I forget about where I am for a moment while I watch. Everyone seems to hold their breath, Ben beside me too. The woman’s neck is beautiful, very slender, with perfectly clear skin. The end of her hair takes up the top eighth of the square hole, and acts as a kind of frame. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the woman starts to turn her head to the right, like she’s about to look through the hole back at us. Just as we begin to see the line of her jaw, though, the edge of her cheek, the corner of her lip, she turns back the other way, until we can only see her neck again. I feel like I have been standing completely still for all the time we have been watching, and that Ben has too, but, when I take a breath in, just as the square empties and the woman disappears, our knuckles knock together, and our forearms touch. “Wow, you’re so warm,” I say, without really thinking.

Ben doesn’t say anything back, but I can see that his cheeks turn red. “So, what did you think of that?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, blinking. I open my mouth and close it again. Sometimes a piece of art has an effect on me that I can’t quite put into words or even comprehend properly. I feel like I became aware of very tiny things as we watched the woman: strands of her hair, the pores of her skin, the gradient in which her skin tone changed slightly, the shadow her vertebrae made. So much attention was placed on her neck, but I didn’t want to bite it; I’d just wanted to keep watching it, endlessly, across time, across centuries, unchanging.

I pick up the artist’s card, which just has a white sheet on the front, without a hole cut out of it, before we leave. I’m surprised when Ben goes back into the room where the little clay figures are to get that artist’s card for himself. The terra-cotta-colored woman with the missing breast is on the front of that card. “They were nice,” I say to him while we’re leaving the building, just to make conversation. “Those little sculptures.”

He nods. “Yeah,” he says. He nods again and kind of purses his lips, like he wants to say something. Then he says, “Yeah, I think my mum would like her work.”

“Oh, right,” I say. I’d forgotten about Ben’s mum, how she’s sick. I don’t know what else to say, so I don’t say anything.